Tangled Web UK Review October 2008
The Likeness by
Tana French
hbk out August 08
Published by Hodder
at £12.99
This is an unusual and absorbing crime novel, a successor to the author’s In The Woods, which sent the critics of some of the ‘heavies’ into one of their frequent paroxysms of delight, this time well-deserved.
The Irish author sets the story again in or near Dublin. Detective Cassie Maddox was previously in the Murder Squad and had acted as an undercover agent but for various reasons, is now unhappily stuck in the Domestic Violence Unit. The body of a young woman is found stabbed in a ruined cottage in the nearby Wicklow Mountains and is identified as Lexie Madison, a post-graduate living in a sort of commune with three other Trinity students in Whitethorn House, a rundown old mansion not far away.
Extraordinarily (very!) she is the spitting-image of Cassie, but not only that, her name is the same as the one invented by the police when Cassie was undercover several years earlier - a synthetic person who never actually existed and who disappeared again when the sting was over.
Frank, the senior and very devious detective who ran Cassie undercover at that time, persuades her to assume the identity of the dead girl to infiltrate the student household. He tells the other students in the peculiarly tight-knit group, that Lexie did not die , but recovered in hospital. Cassie’s man-friend, Sam O’Neill, another senior detective who actually has charge of the investigation, has the vapours over this and the ill-feeling between the two policemen runs through the book.
Cassie lives for a month in this weird situation, where three young men and another girl live in stifling proximity, hardly letting the others out of their site. Two other possible perpetrators are introduced, but the money is on one of the Whitethorn residents being the killer.
Undoubtedly, this book is a page-turner - and my, there are a lot of pages! It is good value at 553 closely-packed pages at £12.99,
but in my opinion it would have been improved if it was thirty-percent shorter. It is markedly over-written, with every incident dissected and discussed at inordinate length. I’m sure there are many readers who will relish wading through this word-jungle, but I just had to start skipping bits and rapid-read down the centre of many pages, as life is too short.
I enjoyed the book for its novelty and imaginative theme, though on reflection, it stretched credulity too far in suggesting that one woman could spend a month in that closed environment pretending to be another (who had lived with the others for several years) without getting spotted until the end. And there are gaps in the explanations, such as how the first imposter picked up the identity of a detective’s non-existent phantom, who just happened to be a better fit than an identical twin.
Still, if you want a book that could last you a week on the beach, this is very good value.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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